‘An act of resistance’: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian diaries find a new home

Edinburgh, Scotland – On May 11, 1967, a studious young Palestinian teenager named Raja Shehadeh sat down to compose his first dated diary entry.

“My dearest diary,” began the 15-year-old in English, “today’s expieriences [sic] that I am about to write in one of your wanderfull [sic] pages is sad, very sad, indeed the bees are responsible for making it sad.”

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The bees had been banished from all of the neighbouring gardens, the teenager confided, and the only remedy to this sadness was to “make a treaty with [the bees] and let them take all the honey from your garden provided they don’t disturbe [sic] you and of course you will not have the right to kick them out either … I will not be able to stand seeing these poor creatures being kicked out.”

Was this a child’s rallying cry against the dispossession of the Palestinian people?

“Absolutely,” said Shehadeh, now 75, speaking to Al Jazeera from Scotland’s capital.

On Thursday, his personal journals will be officially transferred to the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, where they will be archived.

Raja Shehadeh’s first diary entry, dated May 11, 1967 [Courtesy of Raja Shehadeh]

Shehadeh, a softly spoken giant of Palestinian literature with some 20 books to his name, was a pupil at the Quaker school in Ramallah when he began diarising life in the Jordanian-controlled Palestinian West Bank. He had come to the realisation that he was living through a period of flux that “needed to be documented”.

“I also realised it was a very confusing period, and that writing about it helped me understand better what was happening,” said Shehadeh, whose maiden diary entry came just weeks before the Six-Day War saw Israel capture from Egypt, Syria and Jordan the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, respectively, among other territories.

Shehadeh’s account of this event – which ended 19 years of Jordanian rule in his West Bank home –  and the many other events that followed in the course of his near-60 years documenting the restive story of Palestine, today account for the bulk of an archive stretching to an excess of 5 million words across tens of thousands of pages.

Raja Shehadeh points to a word in a diary entry dated July 11, 1992 [Hannah Harper]

It was late 2023 when the author, lawyer and public intellectual decided to uproot his archive. Israel’s increased incursions into the occupied West Bank and genocidal war on Gaza convinced him that his collection was under threat of destruction.

Today, he revels in its safe deliverance.

“I went to see it last week,” said Shehadeh. “I saw that they were held in a safe place with double locks and air-conditioning … and I felt very relieved.”

Does relinquishing control of his beloved journal archive to Edinburgh now mean that his diary-keeping days are over?

“Once you start keeping a journal, you can’t stop,” said the Palestinian polymath. “My day is not finished until I’ve put down all my thoughts in a diary.”

Yazeed Abu Khdeir (left) and Mahmoud Muna work to digitise papers, as Raja Shehadeh watches, in Palestine, August 2025 [Courtesy of Hannah Harper]

He chose the University of Edinburgh as the site for his archive due to his longstanding relationship with the city. He has launched 14 of his books at the capital’s annual book festival.

The archive also includes material belonging to his late father, Aziz Shehadeh, a lawyer from Ramallah.

The task of transferring Shehadeh’s substantial collection from Palestine to Scotland required the University of Edinburgh to enlist the support of others, like the Digital Archive of the Middle East at England’s University of Exeter and a Palestinian team from Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop.

“There was a natural coming together, and everyone put ego aside for the greater good,” said Matthew Teller, an English author and journalist. As a friend of the Palestinian septuagenarian, Teller knew of Shehadeh’s fears for the safety of his archive from the very start and came on board as project director.

A handwritten letter dated January 10, 1949, sent to Aziz Shehadeh by the Akka-based business owner Bahjat Eleassa from displacement in Lebanon [Courtesy of Raja Shehadeh]

Shehadeh’s latest work is Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials (2025), which he co-authored with his American wife Penny Johnson. He is also the founder of the longstanding Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, based in Ramallah.

Teller, whose new book, Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller, will be published later this year, told Al Jazeera: “There was a lot of discussion about workflow, and I put together a costings … to figure out a way forward.”

Working in the shadow of both a rising Palestinian death toll in Gaza and violent Israeli raids on Palestinian properties in the occupied West Bank, not to mention the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Iran in 2025, Mahmoud Muna, the proprietor of the legendary Educational Bookshop in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, and a champion of Shehadeh’s work, gathered together his own small task force to digitise Shehadeh’s papers.

“We had to set up a rig to take high-resolution images corresponding with the specifications required by the universities in Edinburgh and Exeter,” recalled Muna. He was detained by Israeli police in early 2025 after they raided his bookshop in what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nathan Thrall called a deliberate attempt by Israeli authorities to ferment a “climate of fear” among Palestinians.

The digitisation process proved both mentally and physically taxing. Entries scribbled on the likes of boarding passes and napkins required careful preservation.

After each batch of documents was digitally logged, Muna then packaged and shipped them to Scotland using the standard international postal service – a deliberately low-key approach that was vindicated when all eight consignments reached Edinburgh untouched.

The cover of an Arab Airways flight ticket from Amman to Jerusalem, 1956-58 [Courtesy of Raja Shehadeh]

Edinburgh’s world-renowned ancient university is, for many pro-Palestinian activists, damned by its connection to Lord Balfour, who was the university’s chancellor when he issued the now-infamous Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which pledged British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

This rather contentious fact is not lost on Shehadeh. He believes that depositing his archives at the university represents a modern “act of resistance”.

“The Balfour Declaration was the supreme attempt at cancelling Palestine’s existence,” said Shehadeh, who wrote his journals mostly in English. “My archives and those of my father’s are a testament to the failure of Balfour’s intention.”

Kholoud Al-Ajarma, the deputy director of Edinburgh University’s Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, said that in the absence of a “free, safe Palestinian state”, Shehadeh’s archive required outside intervention.

“The natural home, obviously, for all these materials and archives is Palestine,” the Palestinian anthropologist and award-winning photographer and filmmaker told Al Jazeera. “But given how dangerous it is now, unfortunately – and I know of many friends in Gaza whose family archives have been destroyed – I think at this stage, it is really important to save physically whatever we are able to save.”

Shehadeh and his heirs have retained full copyright and control of all of the archive’s intellectual property rights, despite its relocation. Al-Ajarma said the university’s long-term plan includes making the collection “an open access resource… for researchers and students” alike.

Palestine is Heaven, a poem written by Raja Shehadeh at the age of 18 in 1969 and published in The Jerusalem Post newspaper [Courtesy of Raja Shehadeh]

The University of Exeter has collaborated with its counterpart in Edinburgh throughout this process, offering advice and logistical support to Muna in particular. It will publish online large samples of the diaries for immediate reading to mark the official launch of Shehadeh’s records in the Scottish capital on September 3.

“This will be a small showcase of what the material is like,” James Downs, the archivist of the University of Exeter’s Middle East collections, told Al Jazeera.

The selection will be made available with descriptions in Arabic and English in the hopes of generating global interest in Shehadeh’s extraordinary collection.